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In an impressive move to strengthen its position in the public cloud realm, Oracle has just added 10 new enterprise services to the Oracle Cloud. The newest additions include Compute Cloud; Object Storage Cloud; Database Cloud; Java Cloud; Business Intelligence Cloud; Documents Cloud; Mobile Cloud; Database Backup Cloud; Billing and Revenue Management Cloud; and Cloud Marketplace.

At the Oracle OpenWorld conference, which runs this week in San Francisco, company execs discussed benefits of the new apps and infrastructure changes that aim to help customers and partners further leverage the power of cloud computing.

Even before this week's announcements, Oracle Cloud already offered a range of integrated services running in what the company describes as a secure, enterprise, standards-based cloud platform. With this week's addition of new SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) options, Oracle now offers one of the most extensive collections of cloud-based enterprise applications.

Selling with Flexibility

The 10 new cloud services are all available on a subscription basis. Some of the key new offerings include human capital management, customer experience (CX) management, and enterprise resource management (ERP), with built-in business intelligence (BI), social and mobile capabilities.

Oracle is promoting flexibility as a top selling point. The company offers choices as to how to deploy Oracle software: in traditional on-premise data centers, or though private clouds, Oracle Cloud, or other public clouds.

Easy Migration

We caught up with Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, to get his thoughts on Oracle's big cloud announcement. He told us it's now clear to everybody, including Oracle, that the world is moving to cloud. Oracle is offering what cloud customers want: more flexibility when it comes to how they deploy their applications, which applications they use -- and even how to pay for that flexibility.

"It's fair to say that Oracle has been slow to the cloud, but when you look at the number of things they've put into the cloud they have caught up," Kerravala said. "I now take Oracle at face value when they say cloud is an important part of their strategy going forward. It used to be a defensive part of the strategy, but when you look at the breadth of resources they have in the cloud they can be a lot more aggressive now."

As he sees it, Oracle offers a key benefit to clients and partners: all of its cloud products interoperate well with the company's premise-based solutions. That means customers should be able to migrate away from an Oracle on-premise deployment without much risk.

"We're seeing a whole new side of Oracle. One that is a little more customer friendly and partner friendly," Kerravala said. "The old aggressive Oracle of trying to do it all alone and doing it their way seems to be fading away."